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Monday, May 12, 2008

Monday, Monday

I actually don't hate Mondays. Though I know a lot of preacher-creatures do. For me it's a time to rest up and reflect on how we did as a community over the past week, and look ahead without a pressing deadline.

But this Monday began with immediately trying to fix what ailed Bunny's PC. It showed up with a strange window on the screen showing a pctsgui.exe error, with an input field wanting you to send in an error message. PC Tools Spyware Doctor didn't want to run, so we had to trot out Spybot and have at it. Then we found a couple of weird additions including one possible key logger.

Key loggers make most PC techs blood run cold because they capture everything you input into your keyboard and send it away to someone else. In this day of online convenience where we buy online, you can quickly lose your identity and your money. Both of us are very fussy about sweeping our PC's and using safeguards, but I am absolutely paranoid about it and run far more protective software than she does.

But I think we were able to eliminate the threat before it captured any data. (If it really was that type threat.) We both run the much safer Firefox browser, but I add NoScript to mine to eliminate any unwanted program execution without my approval. Bunny tried to do it as well, but the "nagging" that NoScript does finally got to her. We have a hardware firewall too, and Bunny runs the Windows SP2 firewall, but I add another on my laptop and have security set high. I may have to revisit what we're doing on Bunny's PC and add another layer of protection.